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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

Tangential: As an American, one of the things I liked most about London pubs when I first started visiting in the ‘00s was the lack of screens, which were hard to escape in American bars. Unfortunately this was only temporary, as the majority of the London pubs I’ve seen on recent visits are covered with screens like home.

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Sounds like you'd enjoy visiting a pub owned by Samuel Smith.

> Our pubs are havens from the digital world – there are no TVs or background music. The use of mobile phones, laptops and other tech is not allowed in our pubs.

https://samuelsmithsbrewery.co.uk/pubs/

In the 80s, Sam Smith pubs had a ‘25 pubs in London’ challenge. Get a drink in each of the 25 and get a T-shirt. It took me and a friend several weeks. There was a story of some guys doing it in a weekend. Hard because of travel AND opening times of some of the financial centre ones.

Good Times! And of course, no screens and no-one had phones (except in the financial centre and those came with an external battery)

As others say, Londoners/brits make a distinction between “pub” and “sports pub”, the former don’t usually have any TV (or it’s off, only used for big England games when every pub becomes a sports pub).

Contrary to your experience, I’m pretty sure that most pubs are not sports pubs in London

They do though. The old guard keeping the depressing pubholes alive do so by watching their football there. It's usually just one or two screens, granted, but they're there. Thankfully they can be easy ignored.

I'm not into them myself, but a lot of the ones that are struggling these days are the (non-chain) old man, football, working-class pubs in struggling towns.

I'm back visiting for the first extended period of time in a decade, and the bifurcation of the drinking/eating sector is striking. So many new fancy, up-market places with food, craft beer and eye-watering prices; so many shuttered old-school pubs.

It says a lot about where we are as a country.

Blackpool meets London

This can’t be defined away. Most of the members of the set ({pubs} U {sports pubs}) have screens in London.

No screens and at most of them no music either. Very few people drinking while standing. Just a pleasant place to have some beers with friends.

When I moved back from London to the US (where I’ve spent 90% of my life) I was so much more distracted by the screens than I had ever been before.

go to smaller pubs. They don’t have the footfall to justify the exorbitant commercial sports license fees and so don’t have screens. Fancier pubs and gastropubs also tend not to have screens

Sure there are of course plenty of great places. They weren’t like purged or something. But now you have to go searchings, like in the US

I don’t think you do - every few years there are articles of pubs shutting down and it being a crisis. Happened as long as I’ve lived.

You don’t have to go far precisely because your local craft beer haunt, gastropub, sports bar and boozer all serve different clientele.

> every few years there are articles of pubs shutting down and it being a crisis. Happened as long as I’ve lived.

This is very consistent with there being a steady decline. (Likewise, some mock the perennial complaint that "people don't work as hard as they use to", but in fact hours worked per week has been steadily falling for 150 years.)

> You don’t have to go far precisely because your local craft beer haunt, gastropub, sports bar and boozer all serve different clientele.

I don't know what this is supposed to mean. If a country's is dominated by a certain establishment type I like, and then that type loses lots of market share to different types, I am worse off.

That's a sports pub.

Stay away from sports pubs/bars.

I've been in one which had tvs over the orinals, in sweden.

That's kinda brilliant. Nothing worse than missing a goal because you had to answer a call of nature.

What about whizzing on your hands because of your bad timing?

you were trying to head a corner kick?

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